I got word yesterday that plant tests sent to Cornell Cooperative Extension from our Brighton Community Garden showed positive for Late Blight in tomatoes. Late Blight became an ongoing topic of discussion over the weekend as I taught the second module of the PDC with my friend Kai. Friday I was on the phone to David from Providence and he asked how the weather was up here in Rochester, meaning “has it hit yet?” Same day, the NYTimes had an article on the blight.

Kai told me the Late Blight was the same fungus that wiped out the potato crop during the Irish Potato Famine. Michael Pollan’s book Botany of Desire goes into some detail about this. Apparently the Irish discovered that potato and cow’s milk formed a complete protein, and were able to operate this agriculture “under the radar” of British rule. Potatoes were looked at as somehow beneath Europeans, at the time, and were cited as evidence that the Irish were an inferior race and culture.

In doing my research on a theory of localized economics, I’ve started reading Jane Jacobs, and there’s a Potato Famine connection there as well. The British were successful in Ireland, in a way they weren’t successful in the American colonies, in preventing the emergence of a network of cities. Such a network, according to Jacobs, is the basis for dynamic city growth, and therefore national economic dynamism. According to Jacobs, there were no effective ports, replacement crops, or replacement industries or trades that could have absorbed the shock of the crop failure. The Irish economy of the time was anything but resilient.

Back at the PDC, we had a discussion going about what resilience is. This is one of the central tenets of both permaculture and Transition, that we should build resilient systems. But what excactly does that mean? I read from Odum and Barrett’s Fundamentals of Ecology on two types of stability. Resistance stability means the ability of the system to resist external shocks. Meanwhile, resilient stability means the ability of the system to absorb and recover from such shocks. These two modes appear to be mutually exclusive from an ecological point of view.

From this it emerges that the concepts of stability and resilience are quite different. A piece of glass is quite stable- some windows in my house probably date to its construction in 1902. Yet an external shock could easily shatter the glass, and broken glass is pretty hard to piece back together into a window. At least it requires significant energy input as heat and full remanufacturing process as well as purification. On the other hand a piece of raw dough or a bucket of “Slime” is resilient but not stable. I can mash it all day with my hands or whatever and it maintains its integrity, without the ability to have a stable shape.

As the debate raged around the web this weekend over Sharon Astyk’s posts (I & II) on Permaculture and Transition, Rob Hopkins’s response, and a wild flurry of e-mails, I was out planting and harvesting. So were Sharon and Rob, I expect. I guess my response to all that is: “Enough talk- let’s garden.” Every once in a while its good for me to review just what I’ve been doing when.

I got the first head of broccoli and a handful-a-day of snap and snow peas added up to a stirfry. I’ve got scallions, the garlic are about a month away, the strawberries are over, the black caps are coming in and sweetening. Been harvesting lettuce for about three weeks, and will have chard in the next couple of weeks.

Here’s what I planted. First of all, we made a giant run to the nursery and got a potentilla, gaillardia and a bunch of annual flowers (black violets, spoon flower, zinnia, marigolds, asters) for pots on the porch, and herbs to fill in: basil, rosemary, oregano, lemon verbena, pineapple sage, hyssop, a pink-yellow yarrow, shasta daisy and pennyroyal. All these were planted around Friday.

I’ve had much better success this year starting vegetables from seed, which I attribute to using my own leaf compost, sand and peat mix, rather than sterile potting soil. I’ve had no damping off to speak of, and good root growth. With the exception of shallots, everything has transplanted well. So here’s the progress on seed starts I got in the ground this weekend:

• 6 thai basil
• 3 red cabbage
• 6 brussels sprouts
• 6 cauliflower
• 8-10 green chard
• 10-15 lacinato kale
• 3-5 chamomile
• 1 cucumber
• 2 musk melon
• 10 morning glories
• 1 crookneck
• 2 zucchini
• 4 winter squash (blue, lakota, buttercup)
• 1 pumpkin

I also managed to get in a stake-and-string system for the pole beans and put bricks around the center bed. I also cleaned out the garage, cooked dinner, took the kids to fireworks, and did some reading even.

My sad little failures include now four attempts to transplant some thorny locusts out of the front foundation planting bed to the back yard. I’m curious, in fact, how they got to the front bed in the first place. They don’t seem to be like the other locusts on my property- the leaves are more rounded like a black locust. My working theory is the cardinal who lives part time in the spruce deposited them there, but I have no proof.

As I was giving a talk last Tuesday night, someone was asking about weeds, and I instinctively said that I don’t much like weeding and don’t pull many weeds. My neighbor came over later in the weekend and remarked on my fine crop of dandelions. I said, well yes- they are recycling calcium. Dandelions, plantains and thistles all accumulate nutrients from sublayers of the soil and deposit them at the topsoil layer. This must be a characteristic of opportunistic pioneers and many weeds. I like my weeds.