A Self-Sufficient, Friendly Farming Vegetable Garden in the Mountains

Next is Swiss chard, also known as: stone vegetable, cowhide vegetable, pig-sow vegetable; it is a leaf beet, meaning you do not eat the root, you only eat the leaves. This vegetable is also very easy to care for, with few pests or diseases. It grows very large, yet remains tender, and it is an easy-to-grow, delicious vegetable.

The vegetable with fine, slender leaves beside it is fennel. Because last year when I helped hand-pollinate the pear blossoms, the pollen had fennel seeds mixed into it, to help control the amount of pollen, so they got scattered all over the garden. From time to time you can see a few fennel plants growing on their own somewhere in the garden; it is a very wild vegetable. And in our carefully tended vegetable garden it is no exception, and in such a high-quality environment, it grows even better. In addition, because fennel has a unique aroma, no insects want to bother with it either. But when used to make soup or dumplings, or to make snacks, it really is a delicacy on earth!

Also, I wonder if everyone has noticed: this vegetable garden, how is it different from ordinary ones? That's right, it is very messy and full of weeds, because we are all too lazy to pull them. Haha! But the real reason is that there is simply no need to pull these weeds. But perhaps someone will object: weeds will drain all the nutrients from the vegetable garden. And my dad always laughs and says: "The weeds at your place have feet and run around." Because even if the weeds absorb nutrients, they are still in this vegetable garden. When they die, the nutrients return to the soil.

Moreover, weeds can not only protect the soil from direct washing by water, reducing the loss of organic matter and soil, and prevent sunlight from shining directly on the soil, avoiding a rise in ground temperature that would speed up the decomposition of organic matter; on top of that, weeds can also increase organic matter and improve the crumb structure of the soil, making the soil friendlier and more suitable for plant growth. At the same time, in order to survive in poor environments, many weeds instead use methods such as root nodule bacteria to absorb nitrogen from the air and make nitrogen fertilizer, thereby increasing the fertility of the soil. As long as you promptly remove the weeds that grow too tall, block the sunlight from the vegetables, and the thorny weeds that get in the way of work, as well as the annoying beggar ticks, the other weeds can be said to be all benefit and no harm. What is more, there are also delicious edible ingredients such as black nightshade and Showa grass, so how could anyone bear to pull them out?

Because the vegetables planted this time were so successful! So my dad went around giving away greens and joy to his friends. But surprisingly someone said: "Because his (my dad's) family sells fertilizer, no matter how much fertilizer he spreads it costs nothing. That is why they grew so big."

Hearing these words really made me feel sad and angry at the same time. This time we clearly only watered once with liquid fermented fertilizer and spread organic fertilizer once, which compared with other places is truly pitifully little. The mushroom manure added was also just organic matter, mainly used to improve the soil; its nutrient content is extremely low, almost negligible. Our previous hard work in preparing the land and improving the soil environment was the real key to the success of this vegetable planting.

But from this we can also see: what plants need is not a large amount of fertilizer or pesticide, but a good soil environment. If you can provide a friendly living environment for plants like a friend would, the plants will naturally repay you in a friendly and generous way. Therefore I believe that friendly farming should not merely be friendly to people or to the environment; more importantly, it should be friendly to plants.

So as long as you work hard with dedication to create a living environment friendly to plants, and at the same time abandon the old superstition: "as long as you spread more pesticide and fertilizer, the crops will grow well", the incorrect notion, and let plants grow up happy and healthy, then you will naturally get high yields and high-quality agricultural products. In this way you will have the bargaining power to ask for a more reasonable price, and at the same time high-quality products will also be easier to sell. Only in this way can the old problem of unsold agricultural products and depressed prices every year be thoroughly solved.

(This article is reprinted from "Green Sprouts, Issue 50", although the author is still me.)