The Community Library Sedona hosted a workshop to help Sedona and Verde Valley residents learn about growing their own food sustainably on April 23, with presentations by speakers from several local nonprofits working to reintroduce agriculture to the formerly agricultural community.

Regeneration and Seeds

“Everything in the garden contributes to everything else,” Richard Sidy of Gardens for Humanity said, stressing that successful gardening depends upon healthy, biodiverse soil and that healthy soil depends in turn upon soil microorganisms. “Compost is something that nature does. But human beings are impatient. We want to do it faster.”

He described the process of regenerative gardening as entailing “rebuilding habitat in our garden” by replicating the process that goes on naturally in a forest, involving compost and mulch, attracting pollinators, increasing soil microorganisms and using companion plants. “Biomimicry means imitating nature. The best garden is the garden that imitates nature and looks like nature and tries to emulate nature,” Sidy said.

He also touched upon the importance of landrace seeds.

“Seeds have the capacity of adapting to changes in climate from season to season if they’re open-pollinated heirloom seeds,” Sidy said. “If they’re hybrid, and you save the seed, and you save the children of the seeds that did well in your garden, the next generation is going to be more robust and resilient as it adapts to the climate and the environment. It’s going to adapt to your yard, your soil.”

He pointed to last year’s exceptionally dry monsoon as an example of the kind of conditions that would favor seed varieties capable of thriving under climatic extremes.

“How do we adapt to those kinds of climate? We need to have seeds that have programmed themselves to do that,” Sidy said. “We’re creating a Verde Valley race of seeds at the seed library.”

“Many of the foods grown around the world in small communities were adapted for that particular locale,” said Gay Chanler of Slow Food Northern Arizona, adding that the mission of her organization is to “preserve traditional varieties adapted to place.”

She recommended Native Seed Search of Tucson to attendees as a seed resource. “They have been instrumental in reviving native crops like the tepary bean. The Tohono O’odham grow that now,” Chanler said. “They were panicked that Monsanto was going to go to the reservations and take the genetic material from all these native foods. That was the beginning, really, of the food sovereignty struggle.”

“There were no Walmart, no pharmacies, no grocery stores, and yet this land supported people,” Sidy said.

Food Sovereignty

Angel Martinez of Garden of Life, a nonprofit working to improve sustainability within the Yavapai-Apache Nation, said that her orga nization plans to focus on “food sovereignty and healing through plants.”

She defined food sovereignty as “the right of the people, through ecologically sound and sustainable methods … to define their own food and agriculture systems,” and stated that the Nation is working to get away from food banks, government assistance and eating “food from boxes” contaminated with pesticides and additives.

“It’s killing a lot of our elders and a lot of our medicine people,” Martinez added, referring to the relationship between the food supply and one aspect of what anthropologists have termed the “grandmother effect,” the role of elderly individuals as repositories of information that is socially valuable in times of crisis. “It takes away the bonding time when it comes to our cultural stories, when it comes to the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors. They were the individuals that knew and learned to work with a lot of the foods that we have … We do lack a lot of hunting skills, a lot of understanding when it it comes to our cultural roots. Building that relationship, that is a target for the Garden of Life, to learn how to harvest from our area, from hunting to learning how to create our tools, but also our agricultural and irrigation ways of living. This is about bringing back a lot of that knowledge.”

Martinez herself is currently working on an agave pit project to feed “two or three families” and said that her 4-year-old daughter is already very active in the garden. Another of her efforts involves exploring setting up a church to use psychoactive plants for ceremonial purposes “so we don’t have to worry about the government coming in and stepping on our toes.”

“Seventy-five percent of the time we do live off the land,” Martinez said. “You guys are perfectly capable of growing and taking care of yourselves at home.”

Meat or Not Meet

Jon Thompson of Healthy World Sedona made an argument for abandoning meat eating in favor of a plant-based lifestyle, pointing out that 37% percent of the world’s ice-free land is used for grazing and 6% for growing feedstock, compared to the 6% of land used to produce human consumed crops.

“If you avoid eating a pound of beef that you would ordinarily, you’ll save more water than you would by not taking a shower for six months,” Thompson said, adding that animal agriculture in the U.S. consumes 11 times the amount of water used in private homes.

Alternatively, Chanler pointed out that meat-eating is an important practice in many cultures around the world. Anthropologist James Suzman noted in “Affluence Without Abundance” that members of foraging societies historically obtained around two thirds of their calories from meat.

Food Forest

Mike Spielman, the farm manager at Verde Valley School, rounded off the presentations by giving the audience a hands-on demonstration of how to build a type of regenerative production system called a food forest, in which a range of companion plants including trees and shrubs are combined for mutually supportive production, in the middle of the community room using plants he had brought with him.

“This is adaptable to backyard gardens,” Spielman said. “This kind of system brings the community together. It literally is a community. It’s a community of plants.”

He began by setting out apple trees at intervals of about 16 feet in full sunlight, between which annual crops could be grown, such as the traditional corn-beans squash combination that originated in Mesoamerica and later spread across most of the Western Hemisphere. Since strawberries like shade, he placed the strawberries on the east side of the trees to minimize their expo sure to afternoon sun. Mint can absorb more sunlight, so he planted that off to the side of the strawberries, then placed salvia, sage and hops between the main crops and the trees.

“You learn to kind of sculpt with plants,” Spielman said. “You know what it’s going to be this year, you know what it’s going to be in three years, eventually you know what it’s going to be in 15 years.”

After the first two to three years, Spielman continued, it would be possible to start adding other plants farther out from the trees at three-foot intervals, such as herbs and collard greens. As the initial plants increased in height, they would naturally create shade and microclimates for less sun-tolerant plants.

“These are like a mix of hardy, long-lasting perennials, self-seeding annuals and biannuals,” Spielman said. “I’m always thinking about making seed … What we do here is create a living seed vault.”

He recommended the use of bee balm and tobacco as natural bug repellents, beans for fixing nitrogen and dandelion to increase bioavailability of soil nutrients.

“Around everything we’re mulching, we’re bringing more nutrients in,” Spielman added. He harvests around 15% of the seeds produced by the plants in the VVS garden; the rest wait in the soil.

Sedona Sustainability Manager Bryce Beck stated that the city currently has no plans to encourage food production in Sedona through deregulation.