Sustainable Gardening

A sustainable garden has to produce an entire cycle, making the loop from fertilizer to plant to production, back to compost while introducing as little outside energy as possible. The same concept applies to sustainable living, although in both cases it is currently impossible to reproduce our current standard of living without introducing outside energy. Even our pioneer ancestors had a lot of help from the Indians and had European imports.

In my garden the two most critical issues are carbon and nitrogen. Currently I'm importing many, many rice straw bales into the garden for the carbon. I'm planning on introducing chickens to the garden (chickens, meet garden) this spring when we have the time to build a chicken coop. This is more challenging than it sounds in bear and snow country; the coop must be built like a fort, an insulated fort. This will give me manure the following spring, two years from now. It will still be raw, not aged manure, so realistically I won't have the manure cycle down for three years. In the meantime, chickens need to be fed, another importation of energy. We have forest with a few sunny cleared patches, little water, no summer rain, and many wild critters to eat corn. We also have gluten allergies, which rules out growing wheat, barley and oats for chicken/human food and the necessary carbon.Entering the picture: millet (pictured above right, proso millet) and buckwheat (pictured above left, mancan buckwheat).
Millet will provide seed heads for both chickens and people to eat, and the stalks should provide the needed carbon. Millet is similar to wheat in it's protein profile, 11%. Perfect for chickens. Millet is also good for the kidneys of the humans who eat it; good clean kidneys keep us energetic and looking youthful. Millet and buckwheat are excellent choices for the small homestead gardener because they don't require a lot of water, tilling, or fertilizer and they are relatively easy to harvest with a hand sickle. You can throw the entire seed head to the chickens or put a sheave into an old pillowcase to thresh it for human porridge. A standard blender will turn buckwheat groats into buckwheat flour for pancakes. We plan to till these into a fenced clearing and use a rain bird on them once a week. Both millet and buckwheat will produce two crops a season even at our altitude. The buckwheat can be re tilled for "green manure" to enrich the soil. Buckwheat is also the only grain which provides the essential amino acid lysine.
I purchased my seeds at Seedland, a site which sells seed for hunters (hunters are terrific at creating wildlife refuges...at least, a refuge before and after hunting season). The shipping cost for 100 pounds of seed added a third of the price, but the seed price was low enough that it was still a good deal. They had mancan buckwheat, which is a bit more productive than common buckwheat, and they also had proso millet rather than the more standard pearl millet. Proso give more distinct grains and is easier to thresh; pearl millet is a bit more productive and is usually thrown straight to the chickens.