Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chapter Five
Warm-Up
In the early 1980s, I had the good fortune to stumble upon what may be
the hottest, driest environment in which traditional desert farmers had
produced food in North America. It occurred at a place named Suvuk,
on the Pinacate volcanic shield of Mexicos Gran Desierto, with at least
40 miles of lava flows, dunes, and dry playa lake beds between it and the
nearest city. Now part of Mexicos National Biosphere Reserve for the
Pinacate and surrounding Gran Desierto, it has gone as long as 36 months
without any measurable precipitation; summer temperatures frequently
reach 120F (49C). One morning in midsummer, I happened to be flying
over the Pinacate just as a Mexican family began sowing corn, beans, and
cucurbits in the wake of the first rains of the summer season.1
Curious to learn what these desert dwellers might be planting in
the midst of such an extreme landscape, I drove to the edge of the lava
and visited the field on foot several more times over the growing season.
There, I recorded air temperatures of 114F (46C) in the full sun and
ground temperatures of 165F (74C) while talking to the farmers and
taking the leaf temperatures of crop plants! Rains came only two more
times that year, but the silty loam in the field stored enough soil moisture
from that very first rain to bring nearly all the cropsMexican June corn,
two bean species (teparies and pintos), squash, and watermelonsto their
flowering stage.
As noted earlier (in chapter 2), the little desert-adapted tepary bean
plants had the capacity to grow prolifically and produce beans, but nearly
all the pinto beans sown the same day germinated but increasingly suffered from heat stress. The pinto plants first aborted their flowers, then
their pods, and then their leaflets closed up, shriveled, and withered
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Date palms are used to shade house walls and reduce the heat load in Egypts
Siwa oasis, in the heart of the Sahara Desert.
and drought wreaked havoc all around them. The following year (2012),
nearly two-thirds of the North American heartland faced comparable heat
waves and drought conditions, devastating the US corn crop and forcing
food prices to rise to unprecedented heights.
Of course, the earths high fever has not yet broken. In a landmark
report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesized the results of 23 climate change prediction models. Based on a set of
well-vetted assumptions about the future release of greenhouse gases,
these models predicted a globally averaged increase of between 3.2F
(1.8C) and 7.2F (4.0C) over the next century.3 That, of course, will put
crops with low thermo-tolerance in the danger zone for heat stress
throughout most of the major food-producing regions in North America.
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A shade-cloth-covered Southwestern-style ramada allows vegetable production throughout the summer at Tucson Village
Farm in Arizona.
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Parable
While I was spending a month in Guatemala in the early 1990s, I became
aware of the fact that the concept of nurse plant guilds was well known not
only in the Sonoran Desert where I was from, but in the hotter tropical
reaches of Central America as well. I had spent a week trying to sleep in
the sweltering heat of a multistory concrete apartment in a crowded colonia
of a Guatemalan city before gaining access to a palm-thatched palapa hut
in the middle of a coffee plantation. Although the two dwellings were
located less than two miles apart and shared the same macroclimate, the
microclimate in the coffee plantation was at least a dozen degrees cooler
by noon each day. The air-conditioning there was not built into the wall of
the cone-shaped hut, but came from the palm thatch of the roof, the coffee
trees around the hut, and the dense tree canopy above us.
The cultivated tree that provided us such relief from the heat is known
throughout Latin America by the name madre de cacao, mother of cocoa.
It is a nitrogen-fixing legume known to scientists as Gliricidia sepium. It
may now be the woody tropical plant most widely used across the world to
provide shade for cacao, coffee, and other shade-loving crops. 5
Although scientists have fostered the spread of madre de cacao as a
nurse plant for coffee to the many parts of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, its first use as a buffer against heat stress
likely began in the Mayan-dominated reaches of Central America, where
madre de cacao was first recruited to provide shade for tender young cacao
plants. This must have occurred anciently, for madre de cacao is linked to
both chocolate and arboreal monkeys in the ancient Mayan epic the Popul
Vuh. As historians of the Mayan agricultural landscape have written, the
cacao plant became dependent upon madre de cacao trees because it
requires a fine-tuned ecosystem to survive: it is wind sensitive, sun sensitive, drought sensitive, and nitrogen dependent.6 Were it not for the tall,
shade-producing, nitrogen-fixing windbreaks and nurse plants of madre de
cacao and a close cacao relative (balam-t, protector tree), we might never
have enjoyed the pleasure of eating chocolate or drinking hot cocoa.
In his Travels in Central America, first published in 1775, the Reverend Thomas Gage recalls indigenous farmers explaining to him how
cacao plants needed to be protected by some kind of tree with maternal
instincts, often called step-mothers (madrinas) or nursemaids (nodrizas)
in Latin American Spanish:
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Mesquite functions as a protective nurse tree for herbs at Rancho el Peasco Eco-Lodge in Sonora, Mexico.
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A palo verde tree acting as a nurse plant for saguaro and barrel cacti in the Sonoran Desert.
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A peach tree serves as a nurse plant, shading herbaceous perennials in its understory.
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Most tall cacti in the desert, including this saguaro, begin their lives under nurse plants such as
ironwood or mesquite.
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This leguminous nurse tree provides protection from heat, freezes, drought, and wildlife damage to understory annual and
perennial food plants. Drawing by Paul Mirocha.
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Desert permaculturist Brad Lancaster uses the vines of Mexican creeper or coral vine (Antigonon
leptopus) to shade his south-facing windows in summer, creating a cooling boundary layer.
Permaculturist Greg Peterson grows edible vine crops on trellises that reduce heat loads on walls at
his Urban Farm in Phoenix, Arizona.
Hops form excellent vines for trellising up walls to reduce their heat loads.
Weve found that 110 boards or scrap aluminum sheets serve well as
planting box walls to enclose 8 inches or more of rich, locally generated
compost. You may want to convert these planters to cold frames during
cooler months, placing glass or plastic covers over them to retain heat.
3. Situate each planter box so that its front wall is 18 inches from the
house wall, or immediately below the distance that the eaves of the
house extend out past the wall. Drill an eye hook in the eaves immediately above the planter and attach a wire to it, which will later be used
to stabilize the 7- to 8-foot-tall trellises that will reach up toward it.
4. Take lightweight aluminum stocking fence with 24-inch openings
or alternatively, build a latticework of locally grown bamboo or carrizo
(giant cane) that is shaped into an 8-foot-high, 4- to 5-foot-wide
rectangle. With bolt cutters (or pruning shears) cut the rectangle into
a leaf-like image, one that is either wide and multi-lobed (like a maple
leaf) or narrow and serrated (like an elm). Stand this up as trellises
attached to the back wall of the planter box on the ground level, and
to the wire extending down from the eye ring in the eaves on the top.
The trellises should now stand 18 to 24 inches from the house wall in
order to create a shaded boundary layer of sufficient buffering value
in order to cool the wall itself.
5. After the last possibility of frost, sow three to five seeds of an edible
vinecucumbers, bitter melons, scarlet runner beans, pole beans,
peas, passion flowers, grapes, hopsjust below the trellises. When
they germinate and establish seedlings, train the tendrils of the vines
to climb the trellises.
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Horizontal trellises for grapevines provide shade over walkways in the Gobi Desert of China.
6. As the plants mature, train and prune them to fill out the leaf-like shapes
of the trellises. Occasionally measure the temperature of the house wall
shaded behind the trellises and compare it with the temperature of
the same wall where (and if) it is still fully exposed to the sun.
7. If you are mathematically adept, calculate the cost of building the trellises and planters versus the energy savings gained by cooling the wall
instead of running a cooler or air conditioner inside the house for longer.
8. As fall progresses, remove the trellis bottom from the planter, and
hinge a glazed cold frame cover onto the box to grow onions or
greens until the following spring.
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