The Small Farm Future Blog

Cordelia’s garden: or is female to male as polyculture is to monoculture?

Posted on September 24, 2013 | 4 Comments

Throughout most of its existence, I’ve been the main grower for our market garden but this year my wife Cordelia has been in the forefront while I’ve sat at my computer preparing endless submissions for our planning appeal and writing elegant rebuttals to all those other angry men at large in the blogosphere who are too benighted to see the truth of my words.

But now our planning appeal is over I’m getting back into the growing, helping Cordelia to put this year’s season to bed, and planning for next year. All of which has set me to thinking about the different ways we go about things. Here’s a picture of Cordelia’s garden – it looks very different to the serried ranks of my own rigid rotations. For one thing it’s got lots of flowers in it – flowers, I tell you! To be honest flowers have always been a big part of commercial market gardening in the UK, at least until they were outsourced abroad like just about everything else these days. But it would never have occurred to me to grow sunflowers and sell them on our stall alongside our vegetables, as Cordelia’s been doing this year.

For another thing, she’s got all sorts of plants jumbled around the garden, making a fine mess of my rotations – kohlrabi here, radish there, physalis and peas in the polytunnel, mizuna next to the squash, and squash mixed up with the sweetcorn. A right old jungle it is. ‘How am I expected to find the bloody radishes?’, I ask. ‘Well, you could ask me,’ she says, ‘I know where everything is.’ It all gets weeded and picked meticulously, or at least as meticulously as time and labour allows. And she invites people to come for a picnic or lend a hand every Thursday, which people often do.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a talk about polycultures on my holding, and as I prepared for it I developed a slight panic trying to think of convincing examples. Actually, compared to the average arable farm, the whole place is intrinsically polycultural with its mixture of trees, grass, fruit crops, staple crops, vegetables and livestock. But looking in my vegetable plot, with my rigid rows of cabbages, lettuces, squash and the like, it’s hard for me to escape the sensation that I’m just a downsized monoculturist.

Research in many small-scale agricultural societies suggests that it’s often women who take care of the polyculture in the garden, while the men grow the staple monocrop in the fields. It also suggests that when peasants turn away from self-provisioning towards commercial farming, it can be the female farmers who lose out – relegated from being linchpins of family subsistence to domestic ornaments while the men get to play with their new machinery. And the social polyculture of the community, also typically tended more assiduously by women, often atrophies alongside it. So all of this prompts my question ‘is female to male as polyculture is to monoculture?’ (a subtitle shamelessly stolen from Sherry Ortner’s founding article of feminist anthropology, ‘is female to male as nature is to culture?’)

OK, now for some caveats. Generally, I dislike it when people bandy about over-generalised ‘female’ and ‘male’ principles and then seek to apply them to individual men and women. After all, there are plenty of men who like flower arranging and plenty of combatively aggressive women (Cordelia, for example, albeit only when I accidentally weed out her sweet peas). But even though my social scientific training that tells me these gender identities are mere social constructs (try telling that to a cockerel or a bull) dies hard, I think there may be enough of an overlap between these gendered tendencies and actually gendered men and women to advance my general hypothesis.

Some more caveats. A market garden rotation may look like a bunch of individual monocultures, but it’s also a polyculture in the medium of time. As Ford Denison, author of the excellent Darwinian Agriculture and sometime contributor to this blog has argued, there’s good evidence for the benefits of rotations but less good evidence for the benefits of intercropping. Polycultures typically yield less than their highest yielding component alone, and are not necessarily more resilient than less diverse systems either – examples perhaps of what Denison calls ‘misguided mimicry of nature’. Maybe that’s why there are so few convincingly established agricultural polycultures and so much competing advice in the gardening books. Besides which it’s a right bloody faff managing the complex requirements of more than one in situ crop and fitting them into a sensible rotation, although we’ve found a few things do work quite well such as asparagus/parsley, tomato/basil and various clovers undersown to just about anything we can.

Anyway, despite all that I’m glad that Cordelia’s been investing her female/male/whatever energies into the market garden this year and I’m really looking forward to working with her more closely on it in future years. Like a lot of couples, we’ve had our trials and tribulations over the years figuring out the ways in which we can work together and the ways in which we can’t but, unlike Ford’s plant polycultures, I think the intercrop of the two of us working together on the market garden will be able to create something better than either of us working alone. Maybe the traditional division of labour will assert itself to a degree, with me on my own in the tractor working the field crops, and her in the garden working with our merry band of volunteers. But both of us have a secret affinity for a bit of (judicious) tillage and a few power tools, and a liking for kicking back with our friends on the farm, so I’m optimistic that we’ll figure something out that works.

‘As long as we can have lots of flowers in the market garden again next year,’ says Cordelia.

‘I suppose so, they’re good for beneficial insects anyway,’ I grudgingly reply.

‘Yes, and they look nice too.’