This is the big idea of science. You take the overwhelming complexity of the world and isolate one variable at a time in a controlled experiment. Using measurement and maths you figure out the underlying “law” of the universe and bingo presto, you should be able to control any situation in the future. This approach to life barely works for particles and purified chemicals, but falls apart long before you get to the complexity of a single cell. Jump up to ecosystems and you are in a completely different universe. The only law of the jungle is that there are no laws.
My inga alley system is a relatively controlled experiment. The inga trees dominate the space and I varied their spacing a bit to find the local optimum, a test that took nearly a decade to yield results. I can alter the timing of when I cut them, how often I grow crops, how I handle the biomass. The cropping system is pretty simple- maize complemented by amaranth and chia, understory cucurbits of a few species, potential for legumes in the future. Each of those has variables in terms of spacing and arrangement, timing to sow and harvest, integration with weed/biomass management, harvesting logistics etc. Already there are more intertangled variables than I can hope to explore in the remainder of my life. I am 47 this year, which means I have about a dozen seasons left in me before old age officially arrives. That isn’t many chances to experiment (especially since a few of those years will be droughts or floods).
All of this is leading up to the point that there are so many different ways of approaching the problems in front of me that there is no conceivable way I could test them all out. But I am always keeping my eyes open. How people grew crops during preindustrial times is mostly a lost art. Almost nobody who was doing this essential agriculture in that time were capable of writing down their precise methods. The exact feel for the techniques often fails to translate into text anyway, and the world we inhabit is different on multiple fronts anyway even if we occupy the exact same patch of land as our ancient forebears. The key question of how people managed to feed themselves for the last few thousand years will not be answered by looking in any library. But there are surviving threads from this time that are around, and I was lucky enough to spot one recently.
The Going to Seed organisation hosts a range of useful courses you can complete online (go check them out). One I went through is the Centre of Origin Traditional Farming Methods in Southern Mexico (https://goingtoseed.org/products/2597056). This region has a comparable climate to mine, so I paid extra close attention to everything they did. I was amazed to see groups of people sowing maize into a low lawn of broad leaf weeds on a steep mountainside. I doubted the seedlings could establish themselves through that much competition. Unfortunately, the video only came back to the well-established crop, so I don’t know exactly what happened during those crucial first weeks of growth. But it was enough to inspire me to try something comparable myself.
Last spring I selected a weedy overgrown corner of my vegetable garden beside the house. This area was partly flower gardens under some trees we removed a few years ago, and a strip of shady weeds before the original veggie beds began. The spot was mostly dominated by 50 cm tall half dead Bidens, but with a scattering of grasses and other weeds as well. I hand slashed it close to the ground with my kama sickle over the course of a few days’ work. The debris was piled up wherever was convenient. I hoed any grasses out and threw them on the piles to die. When the rains started I let the weeds regrow and the seed bank germinate until they were about 20 cm tall, then quickly slashed it down again (this took about 15c minutes for a 10 x 10 m patch). I did this weed cut back cycle one more time and then sowed the maize in clumps of three across the space (avoiding areas with more grass regrowth so I could hoe them more easily later). I also broadcast a little amaranth and chia, sowed seminole pumpkins at the base of the debris piles, and sowed my “bush” snake beans in the middle of the maize triangles. The maize germinated strongly. I slashed the regrowing weed lawn a couple more times until the crops started to dominate, then only spot weeded any that started to flower.
When the first couple of cobs showed parrot/rat damage I decided to harvest the whole maize crop. Even though this area is about a third of the size of the inga alleys I sowed with maize this year the final yield was pretty much the same size. The amount of work was also much less (provided you don’t mind seeing all those messy weeds, though to be fair the inga system ended up fairly weedy since the mulch was raked back for sowing). A couple of amaranths ended up establishing and doing well, though the chia outgrew it here as well. The pumpkins are just starting to fruit, and will finish the season strongly with the maize stems cleared away and added to the debris piles. I left a few maize stems with snake beans climbing up them as an experiment to see how they perform (pods are rotting as they mature during this spell of wet weather). This has inspired me to experiment staple beans up the maize in the inga patch next year.
Boiled down to a simple single metric this approach to growing maize seems like it is vastly superior to my inga alley system. Less than half the work for the same return means the EROEI is at least twice as good, probably approaching the magical value of 5. There are other significant issues at hand. The inga system produces wood, which is essential for cooking the maize and other functions. It also works without fertility inputs, while this patch of weedy vegetable garden has received nutrient inputs in the past in the form of urine and tree mulch, and benefited from the dying tree roots. The strongest maize grew closest to the concrete driveway boundary and may have benefited from leaching minerals. I also suspect if this weedy patch was cropped repeatedly its output would drop over time, while the inga systems with their mineral lifting roots and nitrogen fixation have proven themselves to yield consistently for many years without any inputs.
I do have a lot of weedy land relatively close to the house, so I will try this method of growing maize again next season. My most likely target is a mandarin, banana and perennial cotton orchard just past the dog run. The rows are very wide here so there is room to fit crops in, and the disturbance could be used to establish more rows of cotton (which is great to have close to home since it needs to be harvested regularly). There is more grass in this area though, but perhaps I can pile the weedy biomass on top of it to wipe it out.
I noticed the cobs were a bit on the immature side while I was processing them (still feeling a bit rubbery). The final carbohydrate yield will probably be lower than mature crops, but this needs to be weighed up against the amount that would be lost to vermin before harvest. Getting the timing right for harvesting maize is tricky, especially in an early grex population which is still quite variable. Around 10% of the cobs were well formed and more mature, so I intend to favour these in future sowings to see if I can reduce the growing season and make the maturity time more uniform. I have also started to notice a significant 25% of the crop grows much shorter than the rest, even under ideal conditions, and produces small cobs. These may be reproductive opportunists who put more energy into producing pollen than seed. I plan to start rouging out undersized plants before they have an opportunity to flower from this point forward. All of this will reduce the genetic diversity in my population, so if you were thinking of getting some of my maize seed to add to your own breeding project you might be better off securing some sooner rather than later. The genetics which is optimum for my conditions and habits may not work for you at all.
All of this is very interesting, but I wanted the main take away message from this post to be this: don’t be afraid to set aside a little bit of time and space and energy to try doing things a totally different way, including techniques which every expert says would be a waste of time. Most of the time you will fall on your face (so only invest resources you can afford to waste), but often enough it will open your eyes to a whole see of possibilities (and more than anything it makes every season in the garden an adventure).
You've inspired me to try planting some corn seed I got at a swap in a weedy area. Tried to grow potatoes there to remove the grass and weeds but they were tenacious. Our spot used to be a flower farm and the lingering seed bank is beautiful but also aggressive. But the seed is free and probably old so may as well throw it in the ground. Cheers!
I like this experiment Shane, I used a similar method of cutting back weeds and keeping them at bay some depleting the seed bank and keeping them low enough for crop to come up then heavy green mulching the areas. Eventually yes it did deplete the seed banks and I missed my helpers, but then I discovered wild lettuce, a plant that grows where a weed would, but also can grow happily in good soil, if pruned up to the crown makes an absurd amount of seeds, and is easy to manage. Beans also grow happily with them, like with corn, so the beans fix N for the lettuce and the corn, then the cut and come again lettuce leaves make the mulch, and the roots if left in place attact fungi, and the the stalks if left to dry in ground also become a hollow light "wood" that you can then drop and it and bean vines and leaves really make a nice thick matt with great drainage ✨