A sad yet grateful conclusion to this project

I, to an extent, am not shocked by the outcome of this project. Typically, the goal is to find whither or not your hypothesis has been supported or rejected based on the data that you collect. As my data turned out to be three seeds germinated, one in the urban summer squash row and then two in the indigenous summer squash row. Each of them got about and inch or two tall, and then promptly died. Seeing as the data that I was to collect and then judge the accuracy of my hypothesis was dependent on the growth with at least a few specimens from each row, I must come to the conclusion that my hypothesis was rendered inconclusive due to the non-growth of enough plants to complete the experimental methods of testing and research.

As I suggest to my students, no research project to whatever extent is a failed experiment, for there is always something we can learn and walk away with for future application. In this instance, where I was hoping to test more conventional urban farming methods against that of indigenous methods, even before I raced just to get the seeds into soil before the Phoenix heat became too extreme, I had an incredibly difficult time with trying to locate strong or even consistent information regarding the farming practices of the Hohokam tribe of central Arizona's Sonoran desert. One afternoon I found myself digging through the Arizona archives room at the Phoenix public library, looking up excavation recordings and interactions with more recent tribes, as it is known that the Hohokam vanished before European settlers came to the valley of the sun. So, as opposed to  being able to put indigenous farming methods into practice, I spent the little time that I had for the project just trying to find them, but ultimately came up unsuccessful.

Modern urban farming, on the other hand, is alive and well in Phoenix. There are an abundance of resources such as urbanfarm.org  and phoenixpermaculture.org, and the information, workshops and community leaders that they provide access to is nearly overwhelming, and for someone like me who is still very "green" (as in being a rookie) to the whole gardening thing, it is comforting knowing that those resources are there. I ran into a bit of a hesitation though as even though those resources were there a plenty, I didn't want to pursue them until I had some indigenous farming practices in which to balance and move forward with equal application to both experimental groups. Truth be told I went ahead with a little of the urban knowledge that I had quickly learned just to get some of the seeds up and running, but if I were to continue any further as such, I felt, I would be ruining the validity of the experiment. Subsequently, the plants mostly never germinated, and to the three that did, died quickly.

In regards to the research style chosen, I went with an experimental method for the testing, but was introduced to the idea of the auto-ethnography, where I document the research in a narrative format to be an accompanying format to the research. This blog served as that medium, though with dwindling frequency of blogging, the effectiveness of the auto-ethnography waned. Still though, I am quite happy that I was able to learn of and put into practice this type of research as if fits more of my narrative style and hope that I am able to incorporate it into my eventual practicum and and dissertation. I find it to be a very authentic and genuine means of collecting data, one that engages both the researcher and the reader, pending that the research itself doesn't die out on me.

In grand conclusion, even though this particular project did not pan out as I would have hoped, I am not discouraged from what my original intent was; which was to get me in the garden and start trying my hand at becoming a "prosumer," or one who produces and consumes it. I still intend and wish to produce at least a fraction of my own produce, but still see myself tied heavily to the grocery store. That, and trying to take on a rather sizable lifestyle and habit change in the midst of full time teaching and full time grad school proved to be rather difficult, especially with the sensitivity of plant life in the desert.  If I had more time to understand some of the basics and couple that with what the urban farming resources could provide, then maybe I could look into some indigenous methods to see how I can hybridize the two in hopes of creating an effective, modernized version of what indigenous people did centuries ago to sustainably cultivate the desert land. For the time and effort I was able to give to this project, I will say that I enjoyed it, even though it grew frustrating  to not see it pan out the way I had envisioned. Still though, the resources, skills and ability to initially experiment will prove helpful as I attempt this again in the fall. Even though I won't be dependent on the cultivation of abundant crops like the Hohokam, I can still try my hand at growing my own food, which I think is something that all people, no matter where they live, should be able to do. That skill can be essential to developing a sustainable food system and bring the experience of working and living with the land back home.

Public Enemy #1...and a bunch others

There are these things that fly around my backyard, a.k.a birds, a.k.a. uncontrolled variables. And they are starting mo make this gardening process a real hassle. What I am starting to find is that these buggers are digging at what I have planted, I am assuming in attempt to find and eat the seeds. Since I laid out the seeds I come home to find several of the pots knocked over with the soil pecked about; not what I would call the most encouraging sign for hope of growth.

I have bird feeder in my backyard, and have filled it many times before starting this project, so I assume that from this establishment I have already instigated this process by training the birds that "oh! there is food in seed form here for the taking. Enjoy!" I did this because 1. I like birds and 2. I am a closet ornithologist wanna be, so I like to identify birds. For central Phoenix, there hasn't really been any special sightings, but here is what I have identified so far:

• House Sparrow
• House Finch
• Thrasher
• Mockingbird
• Rufous Hummingbird
• Mourning Dove 

The Thrasher and Mockingbird  are my prime suspects though, as I've seen them dig their longer beaks into the soil in the pots and around them as well. I am not around to block these birds all day, and I don't have something to protect the seedlings from them. Also, what I find interesting is that most of these birds were introduced and thrive in urban areas, so I can't help but think that these were not a problem for the Hohokam tribe that lived here. In fact, the only pest that I could find noted that affected tribes of the southwest was the root cutworm that attacked the corn (Fisher, 2004). Even still, they had figured a way to move their crops to elevations that allowed frost to kill the worm, but as we don't have that luxury of moving (or cutworms, or even the corn for that matter), I see this more as a Indigenous issue as opposed to one that would face an urban farmer. In the mean time, I am still not sure what to do about these birds, and have a hurt hope that anything will grow.

Fisher, Richard D. Paquime: The Anasazi Rosetta Stone: The Unifying Theory of Seven Elemental Hypothesis for Archaological Interpretations of Oasis America (2004). http://www.canyonsworldwide.org/fisher/site.htm

The line up...for now at least.

Click the image to enlarge.

This is the tentative placement for the plants. As stated all of the seeds are in the pots and I'm awaiting germination, but this could change the more I read up. As of now though, this is where these guys are going. Notice how I have each row labeled either Hohokam or Urban. The top half of each vegetable row will be receiving the identified Urban farming method and the bottom half will get the Hohokam methods. I thought about separating them further, but with the respective vegetables right next to one another, they will receive the same amount of sunlight exposure, so I thought it best to have the vegetables in side by side rows so that the sunlight control is kept as constant as possible. Water might get a little tricky, but can be better managed with how the individual vegetable rows are separated.

Not quite in the ground...

It was a lot of cottage cheese and yogurt.

Alrighty, well I am about 2 weeks behind the planting schedule but so is about everything else in my life at the moment, so I think we're doing okay for consistency. Over the past week, I have collected all of the pots that I could from home and the neglected ones on my bottom shelf back in my classroom. When I realized I was going to be woefully short of my projected 64 plants, I found one of my "reduce, reuse, recycle" items. I have been amassing yogurt, cottage cheese and humus containers for almost two years now, thinking "you don't know when you are going to need a good container!" Evidence in photography.

Prematurely devouring the last of the yogurt in the fridge to acquire the last needed container, I got to my goal of 64. 64 was chosen because it was the number that came out to allow enough spacing between plants along the rows while still allowing for enough test subjects to produce reliable results ( I have at least 12 plants of each type planted in the pots). I placed them where I envisioned them going when formally planted. Once the spacing was done, I placed a bit of the compost in the bottom of each planter from my compost bins. I realized maybe the Hohokam didn't have compost, so I went inside to scope it out. What I found was...nothing. I found a bunch on modern services with the word "Hohokam" in it, but nothing to do with any composting methods. The urban farming sites were all gung-ho about it, and I already knew that, hence the compost bins, but as I was standing in front of these bins with bugs flying about, I thought that it is likely that the tribe had recycled older plant material and pieces of the squash, beans, corn, tobacco and cotton plants that they did not use. Even though my compost is made of a lot more than that (even with my roommates used coffee grounds) it has turned into some nutrient rich compost. I decided to apply the compost to all pots because the idea of composting didn't start with urban farming; it has been around as long as farming itself, and I want these plants to live and produce much longer than what the semester calls for.

Some conventional and non conventional planters

Compost in, soil in, some water in... and now some seeds in. As I referred to in the upper paragraph, the Hohokam focused on squash, cotton, corn, tobacco and beans (Sharp, 2012). In the April Edition of Phoenix Home and Garden, they suggested that for this planting time in the low desert you plant beans, cantaloupe, corn, cucumbers, green onions, okra, peanuts, pumpkin and summer squash (Cromell 2012.) As I noticed beans, squash and corn overlapping, I decided to go with those as my two overlaps of urban and Hohokam vegetables of choice. I would have loved to gotten the other plants mentioned in the magazine, but figured I would focus on consistency for research sake. Though I did buy some pumpkin seeds for fun, but don't know where yet to plant them.

Cromell, Cathy. April Checklist: For the Low Desert (2012) Phoenix Home and Garden. Scottsdale, AZ.

Sharp, Jay W. The Hohokam: Farmers of the Desert (2012) DesertUSA.com. San Deigo, CA. http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/ind_new/ind8.html

My Hypothesis...

When I was turning up the soil the other day with the mighty pick-ax, I found a couple pieces of glass, discarded trip irrigation tubes, some screws and nails along with some pieces of asphalt shingling. I thought to myself "I bet the Hohokam didn't accidentally dig up pieces of asphalt shingling." I also then thought to myself "I bet the Hohokam didn't have full time jobs and were full time students while they were farming too." Well, I shouldn't say that they didn't have anything else to do besides farm, I am sure the tribes people carried multiple roles, such as farmers, teachers, defenders, parents and all the vital roles that can be found in any society over time. But I can't help but think that they were able to a lot more time and focus to cultivating the land, whereas most people now roll up to the grocery store, plunk down some cash for groceries for the week (be it themselves and/or their families), and stick it in the fridge when they get home....I bet the Hohokam didn't have a fridge when they got home.

 I went to the Phoenix public library to check up on some Hohokam history.They had a special room called "The Arizona Room" which housed a treasure trove of original AZ artifacts. There were a few restrictions though. I was condensed to about 45 minutes worth of research (by my own schedule) and I was not allowed to take anything out nor write anything down (all AZ archives had to stay in that room and no pens were allowed...I didn't have a pencil). I pulled a few pieces off the shelves and kept getting more and more information about the canal system that was unearthed around Sky Harbor International Airport, which is all of a 8 minute drive from my house. What I wanted to find was specific plants and planting methods that the tribe used for the spring, which is when I intend to plant. I didn't find anything. I left the library a little dejected, thinking what the heck did they do, and when the heck am I going to be able to get back to the library to research this stuff with still not having found the time to plant.

 So for my hypothesis. Thinking about those asphalt pieces I am thinking that the urban planting methods will be better. I've come to this immediate expectation because this soil has been subject to well over a century of urban development, has had a variety of things done to it, and is going to be affected by the inability of a busy dude to tend to the plants every need at any given day...I've got four wedding weekends coming up out of town, which is when I get to actually play in the garden. I've got the plant species picked out (corn, summer squash, garden beans and Tepary Beans) which were mentioned on a variety of websites and the PHX garden magazine for both native and modern planting. I believe that trying to incorporate more native methods (if I ever find them) of how to plant won't do well in modern urban farming. The surrounding vegetation is different, the soil is different, the inputs will inevitable be different. And to remind the reader, the purpose isn't to recreate the environment of the Hohokam tribe at the time, it is just to see if there methods would work in an urban setting with an urban farmer with an urban lifestyle. With the very wide, wide, wide range of variables and ill-kept controls... I simply don't see how traditional ecological knowledge will prevail here in comparison to urban methods. I am not discounting that the crops won't grow at all, but I think that the land has been changed so much and my deficiencies as a farmer won't be able to support what successful TEK implementation demands.

Getting going and seeing the light.

I just submitted this project as a talk for the Ignite Phoenix event on May 4th. It is kind of like a more structured TED talk for the community. I gave one of these before for my sustainability education job, which you can see here. It was sweet, but man did it take a bunch of prep work.

I think that this project is very interesting, but if it is actually going to work, then I need to start documenting shorter and more frequent posts, and try to avoid these essay like bonanzas, seeing as I already have a few other essays that I need to address for other courses. So enough about blog posts strategy, lets move on with some dirt.

So, I've started to hunt down the literature that I am going to need for this. A lot of it is conveniently located at the Phoenix public library, so that is a win, but most of those titles I can't take out of the library, so my plan of referencing a lot of that work while in the yard isn't going to happen, unless I can get real friendly with the library...in a strictly academic sense of course. But I can't really move forward with this project until I get the sources to reference from. It is going to take some time to lock down these sources, and the planting season has arrived too. So I have some sources identified at the library and the impulse buy the other day of the latest Phoenix Home & Garden Magazine edition: The Garden Issue. I flipped though it and they have some solid tips about what/how to plant, and also some really fancy pictures of high end fancy gardens over in Scottsdale. Maybe one day I'll get to that point.

But one thing I want to look at is something I can't prevent, but also really like. I have a big tree in my yard, and I recently learned from my landlord that it is a Evergreen Elm. Now, the name is a bit misleading as this tree did just shed all of its leaves this past December/January. But here it is in March and all the leaves are back in full strength. It is a beautiful tree with willow-like weeping branches that are also high enough to walk under. It is thee trademark to my yard, and it happens to blanket my garden in spotted shade.

I am not sure yet if this is going to be a benefit or a liability with the plants as the garden rows are directly beneath the tree, but if I were to hypothesize: I would think that the plants would do better with the shade as the spring/summer heat increases, giving some opportunity for sunlight to hit (to allow photosynthesis to happen) while providing consistent breaks from the hot sun. It isn't really rocket science (plants needing light and all), but the right species for the light allocation that I have is a bit of science. Speaking of which, if you are on facebook and enjoy science, you should probably like this.

The last note I want to make is the neighbors choice of an awning. Being that I live right in the middle of an urban neighborhood, my west wall is my neighbors east wall, so we are very close. Besides all the random noises of animals I hear over there (man and geese..I think?), whatever they decide to put up on their property is something I have to live with, and so is the case with anyone who would want to start gardening in a dense neighborhood. Anyway, if you see in the picture,

it marks a very early onslaught of solid shade onto the garden in the afternoon. I am not for sure in this, but I have a suspicion that it is the reason why nothing grew on my two west rows the initial time I tried to plant. It is a control that will play a big part in how this all goes, but maybe my choice of plants for those rows before (green peppers, zucchini, tomato) just wasn't the right choice anyway.

Access Granted! Now what?

Alright! We have been officially given the thumbs up for this project. With some gracious poking and prodding for me to actually have a clear focus complements of my professor Denise Mitten, Ph.D, there is now solid direction to this project. In borrowing a couple of concepts from another course I am taking, Sustainability Theory and Practice in Education, the idea of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) came into light during one of the papers. TEK is the knowledge often used by indigenous peoples to pay attention to the land to best work with it. This could be understanding seasonal changes to water flows to best maximize crop yield or hunting game. I started thinking about how the Hohokam tribe used TEK to survive for a millennium in the valley of the sun, as place that I initially thought humans should not exist. Turns out they did fine for a thousand years before abruptly disappearing.

Seeing as I have already written the formal research proposal, I'll spare you and myself from another paraphrasing, so here is the link to it that can be found on my school site.

Now that I have the go ahead...what the heck do I do? Before I just started digging up dirt and bought the cheapest seeds at the local hardware store, but now there is a point to all this. This makes me wonder about how most lay persons start when they want to start a garden, which is one of the big reasons why I proposed this project. My being from the East Coast in a water rich environment, those underlying ideas of how to garden there are still the foundation of how I first think to garden here in the desert, a completely different and arid environment. I can't help but imagine that is how many of the gardens in the desert start, and either become very resource intensive processes or the garden keepers just give up because their prior garden knowledge isn't able to sustain a garden in the desert.

You know, sometimes I forget that I teach research methods to high schoolers, and that the very next step is one I assess regularly. I should probably follow that lead. Sounds like a up coming post to me.