About Patrick Frink
Patrick Frink lives in the small town of Ritzville, Washington, sixty miles west of Spokane. This is farming country, dozens of square mile patches of farmland, punctuated with grain elevators. Ritzville is an important center for dryland wheat. You'll find The Washington Association of Wheat Growers here, and there's an office of the USDA in the center of town. Ritzville still has its roots in the past; there's a Carnegie library here, harking back to the time when philanthropy and wealth went hand in hand. There's also an art deco theater, and a bucolic park, swimming pool, and a main street that was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.
The future is also present, nibbling in at the corners. Patrick Frink, for instance, has own family organic farm here. He doesn't sell his goods on a world scale, like some of his neighbors, but sells from a tale at local farmer's markets when seasons are good. His main work, though, is through his fertilizer distribution company and organic farm consulting, in which he works to provide farms of all sizes with organic solutions for the latest in organic farming.
With so many Americans looking to join the “Green Revolution” by reducing their carbon footprint, Patrick Frink and his family wish to educate as many as possible on the ideas that have transformed their home and livelihoods.
Answer to the food shortages
France: the land of technique and ingredients
The phrase "French Intensive Gardening" is appropriate. The French are as intense about vegetable gardening as they are about cooking. It is true that in the last few years, with the availability of quality produce from Spain, Italy, and other countries further afield, as well as the growth of fast food, the French have perhaps loosened the grip on the backyard vegetable patches they so carefully cultivated during the last few centuries, but the technique survives, and is actually (literally!) gaining ground in other European countries and the US -- especially with the increasing possibility of food shortages worldwide.
The move in France to tighten vegetable patches into small, carefully cultivated beds is not at all recent. If you look at a map of Paris, in, say, 1700, even inside the city wall there are hundreds of small patches of gray, each representing a plot of land each family cultivated on its own. French agricultural economy tended to be based on these small farms bringing produce to central markets. Though this was also part of British culture and that of the rest of Europe, many of the farms tended to consolidate well before the Industrial Revolution, whereas France, maybe because of the legacy of the French Revolution, tended to keep things as they were.
But though rural France coveted its traditional potager system, the agricultural technology didn't remain stagnant. While the other European growers in the mid-1800s were developing the tractors, harvesters, and mechanized plowing techniques to plow huge tracts of land to feed the urban workforce, maraîchères, French market farmers, were beginning to see their small gardens as perfect Petri dishes for agricultural experimentation. Plant rotation techniques, planting distances, various fertilizers and new irrigation techniques, impossibly expensive on vast acreages, could be tried on these tiny rectangles of land. Growing seasons and production expanded, and the quality of the vegetables, degrading elsewhere, remained consistent or improved for the French farmer. Books were published, translated, published, and spread through England and Europe, but were ignored by those of the industrial mentality.
The Fortunately, the technique survived. What we are provided with today is the legacy of that experimentation: the French Intensive Garden.
A note of warning before we go further. Do not go to France thinking that every French family has a cute little garden in their yard with a couple of beds bursting with veggies. Also, they do not all wear berets, smoke bad cigarettes and ride bicycles draped with sacks of onions. As France has, like every other nation in Europe, evolved towards an urban society, much of its gardening has disappeared.
But much remains. Just as the gardens at Versailles and Tuileries are tightly knit, prim rows of vegetation separated by carefully defined walkways, so their vegetable gardens persist, some in communal gardens. If you visit a French home and ask about their gardening, they will shrug: it's a garden. Then, slowly, they will work their way into the subject, until you will look at your watch and find that an hour has passed and they’re not even off the subject of mulch.
How serious is the French Garden?
Very serious. More than just flowers for a wedding serious. More than enough basil to get through a few sauces serious. The French garden can be a small space yielding enough veggies for a family of three or four.
If you think I'm creeping up on you with some survivalist, Armageddon-minded concept fomented by guys in camo out at midnight wiring their beanpoles with C4, forget it. We're talking about saving serious money in this economy, using your back yard or any space you can find that's about 8 by 12 feet. Think: eat for cheap.
And this leads to a much more fundamental question about us as Americans. When I'm at the market, I will look at the price of tomatoes, broccoli, carrots, beans, onions, and potatoes, but if I'm coughing up $80 for a tank of gas, paying a high mortgage, and the worth of my dollar is dropping like a cement celery stalk, I will very likely walk out of the store with pizza, hot dogs, and bread. The $3.00 tomato is coming. For some, it's already here. And onions! –the cost of the lowly onion has made me start to wonder if I should start using dollar bills to light the stove.
Now, if someone were to tell me that, for a couple of hours per week outdoors, a little initial expense and time, I could have as many tomatoes, onions, potatoes, carrots, etc., as I could eat, cutting a huge chunk out of my food bill, that might change the way I shop.
If you think that might change shopping for you, read on.
How do I calculate the work involved?
We're not talking about digging up a patch of earth, throwing some seed down, watering, ripping out the food, and it's all gone in one sitting. Dude, that is so 1958. French Intensive Gardening is intense. It uses every square foot of a patch of ground that has been planned down to the last inch, dug and turned deeply and raised some inches above ground level. And all of this is by hand, unless you have a backhoe out in the garage. This garden goes vertical as well as horizontal, so you need some trellis material, too. And now the word Interplanting suddenly enters your vocabulary. Just before one crop is harvested, another goes in. Transplants appear on your window sills (make sure you contain the drainage). Like a concert pianist, you play a little every day, making sure the beds are well tended. Not a lot of work, here, but a little at a time, regularly scheduled.
So how do I calculate the cost?
You will save a lot of money by planning ahead
Therefore your first search will be for expertise. This is found at a local nursery. Books are all right, but in these days of climate change and publishing lead times, your local nursery people are a better start. You want to know soil and climate, water quality and any “special circumstances” (like, that your property was formerly a toxic waste dump – that kind of thing). A bad soil report doesn't knock out your chances at gardening. You can build a raised bed on solid rock. It just takes more soil, that's all.
And mulch, and fertilizer, and conditioner. Composting is one good way of making new soil, but taking into account the rate at which vegetables grow under the French Intensive system and thus the timing involved in fertilizer/conditioner usage, it's good to have a bag of the stuff around, preferably an organic carbon fertilizer like Patrick Frink 2412 (yes, it's my product, small ad here) or similar. Spray-on fish emulsion and various organic feeds are not always necessary, but they're good to have ready.
The Seeds
A packet of seeds is one of the cheapest sources of food in the world. We pass them on the way to the $3 tomatoes, and they stay there in the rack, just waiting to be taken home and grown into massive, veggie-producing plants. Some seeds are sold at food stores. Why don't we buy them?
When we can open a seed envelope, dump it into a bowl in the sink, throw in a cup of water, and the whole thing explodes into a bowl of tomatoes, we'll buy them by the truckload, and that company will IPO at $1800 per share. But this is America, a young nation with a short attention span. We don't want dinky little ant-like things promising to be tomatoes, we want the tomatoes, and we want them NOW.
And we can have them now. Now will be in about 90 days. Okay, calm down. Just think of how much vegetables will cost in 90 days. It's like buying futures. Relax. See, your breath is slackening. This is food as investment, in all ways. This is wise America coming to the fore. Now read the packet.
If you read the climate charts on the packets of seeds, they will tell you the correct time to plant, as of 1973. The climate is changing. Most print data is too old. Natural News and the USDA (http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usdahome), and hundreds of other sites will provide the information about planting, along with special case studies included to let you know if there are climatological factors affecting your future food's life cycle.
These days, with the French Intensive system, you can find seeds to grow vegetables just about anywhere. A farm near San Francisco has produced the Fog City Tomato, which needs little direct sunlight to grow (but takes longer to mature); it can actually be grown on the Oregon coast.
One case study on the Oregon coast concludes that raised beds radically improve your crop yield.
Your climate may be tough, but the French Intensive system is tougher. It's been used in some pretty barren places, and in the seed world, there are hybrids that will provide you with really nice plants at your local nursery (not necessarily a national chain).
Buying the tools
You can set up a 4 x 12 bed for about $200, if you just want to throw money at the project. But by careful selection of tools and the materials, you can spend as little as, okay, $200. But if you plan right you won't have to spend it all at once, and there's a good chance you'll find tools cheap at yard sales, or on craigslist.org. And if you think the resale value of a 1983 Yugo is cheap, go buy some second hand gardening tools. There's where you'll save money. And you'll make it all back in a few growing cycles.
The basic gardening tools: a decent square deep digging spade -- a long handled one is best, a hoe, a few weeding tools, and some basic household tools. You'll also need some wood or plastic border material to build up the sides of the raised beds with. Bricks or stones leak water out the side unless you line the container.
You won't save a lot of money on irrigation equipment if you want the ease of automatic irrigation. Even the simplest systems can be expensive, and some of the cheapest drip systems don't work well. Read around.
Still interested? Cool. I want to step to one side for a moment to spend some time with the history of the French Intensive movement in the U.S., to take care of that tiny part of your mind that's wondering if this whole thing is just one man's single-minded attempt at the highest possible justification of his personal insanity, as most web sites are.
History of the French Intensive system.
These basic soil and planting practices aren't new. The Mayans and Greeks, among others, had used rough equivalents. But the French put them into practice in a modern way, and the techniques survived through the Industrial Revolution, into the twentieth century.
In 1966 Alan Chadwick, an eccentric English gardener (is there any other kind?) came to the University of California, Santa Cruz, then filled with eccentric (or thought to be eccentric) students, and began gardening on a rocky hillside populated only by weeds. This was to demonstrate a gardening style known as biodynamic, which was essentially the French potager system of gardening combined with a holistic philosophy Chadwick studied with the Austrian Rudolf Steiner. Chadwick leveled the hillside a little by filling it with decent soil, and then planted it with seeds in particular combinations. Eccentricity aside, it worked. The hillside sprang to life. By 1968, when the Whole Earth Catalog began publication, his philosophy of planting was widely accepted as the best way to get the most food from a small plot of land. No plants in single rows. No rows, really, just plants placed in such a way as to insure their best growth and to support the growth of other plants.
John Jeavons, working at Stanford, received this technique, tested it, and modified it slightly, to improve crop yields even further. His legacy is Ecology Action at Stanford, California.
Jeavons' harvests have brought the movement to its apex. Yields under his system have produced as much as six times the national average per crop, often more, and opened up ways for a gardener in almost any setting to be successful.